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NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

computerhistory.org

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Re: NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

#81

Post by glasz »

KirinDave wrote: post #26

My father was a lead in hardware engineering and manufacturing at NeXT. I have tons of footage of the amazing assembly technology that they used. I wonder if people would be interested in it. It was heavily top secret at the time, but NeXT built their own custom robotics system (called thor) and had all sorts of amazing in-house manufacturing tech that was incredibly automated. The hardware itself was just beautiful,…

> I wonder if people would be interested in it.

you serious? post them already!

Re: NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

#82

Post by krylon »

KirinDave wrote: post #26

My father was a lead in hardware engineering and manufacturing at NeXT. I have tons of footage of the amazing assembly technology that they used. I wonder if people would be interested in it. It was heavily top secret at the time, but NeXT built their own custom robotics system (called thor) and had all sorts of amazing in-house manufacturing tech that was incredibly automated. The hardware itself was just beautiful,…

> I wonder if people would be interested in it.

Yes, please! That sounds absolutely fascinating!

Re: NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

#83

Post by beautifulfreak »

KirinDave wrote: post #26

My father was a lead in hardware engineering and manufacturing at NeXT. I have tons of footage of the amazing assembly technology that they used. I wonder if people would be interested in it. It was heavily top secret at the time, but NeXT built their own custom robotics system (called thor) and had all sorts of amazing in-house manufacturing tech that was incredibly automated. The hardware itself was just beautiful,…

The Computer History Museum would probably be interested in that too, as well as anything your dad has to say about it! http://www.computerhistory.org

Re: NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

#84

Post by krylon »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #72
gcb0 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall the journalist wanting a pic for the cover of NeXT is dead edition. and even in a industrial oven he had a hard time igniting the magnesium. I think he never did. probably a magnesium alloy

Oh, it burned: http://simson.net/hacks/cubefire.html

But still, he had to do a lot more than kick it.

Re: NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

#85

Post by konradb »

hota_mazi wrote: post #63
zeveb wrote: post #6

The article in general is pretty good, but this is off: > The Macintosh’s operating system was showing its age, especially compared to Microsoft’s Windows 95. I don't think that there was ever a point where Systems 7, 8 or 9 were worse than Windows 95.

When it came out, Windows 95 blew everything out of the water, including AmigaOS. Which was itself vastly superior to anything else at the time, including the various Mac OS. It took years for Apple to even support preemptive multitasking, they were easily 5 if not 10 years behind (and still kind of are today).

> and still kind of are today

What are you referring to here?

Re: NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

#86

Post by deerpig »

hota_mazi wrote: post #63
zeveb wrote: post #6

The article in general is pretty good, but this is off: > The Macintosh’s operating system was showing its age, especially compared to Microsoft’s Windows 95. I don't think that there was ever a point where Systems 7, 8 or 9 were worse than Windows 95.

When it came out, Windows 95 blew everything out of the water, including AmigaOS. Which was itself vastly superior to anything else at the time, including the various Mac OS. It took years for Apple to even support preemptive multitasking, they were easily 5 if not 10 years behind (and still kind of are today).

>When it came out, Windows 95 blew everything out of the water

We had two NeXT color slabs at the time when Win95 came out. We used them to help MS launch Win95 in Hong Kong. NeXT by then was gone as a company and the slabs were getting long in the tooth. We switched to SGI -- the SGI Indy wasn't graphically as slick as NeXT Step, but it it blew away ANYTHING out there. IRIX was a very nice BSD Unix. We built one of the first ISPs in Hong Kong on IRIX. Solaris had just come out, which was a buggy mess, and to me wasn't nearly as nice to work with as SunOS on Sparc 10s. We were running IRIX, SunOS, Solaris and not long afterwards, early versions of Slackware (which ran our Usenet servers). But even today, my fondest memories are using NeXT and SGI -- very cool, very expensive.

Re: NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

#87

Post by masklinn »

georgeecollins wrote: post #78
masklinn wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When it came out, Windows 95 blew everything out of the water Surely not in a technical sense. OS2/Warp and NeXT already existed and BeOS would be released a few months later able to play multiple videos in real time (playing MP3 on Windows would preclude doing anything else with the machine for a few more years, lest you liked skipping).

Windows 95 was the best mass market OS at that time. Yes OS2/Warp and NeXT existed, but they were not popular. The Mac and Amiga OSs were inferior at that point.

That doesn't come even remotely close to "blowing everything out the water".

Re: NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

#88

Post by beautifulfreak »

NeXTWorld Magazine in the early 90s was my favorite publication. Every issue showcased apps with elegant and surprising capabilities, like the first spreadsheet with pivotable rows and columns. John Carmack wrote Doom on NeXT, and claimed that NeXTStep made development ten times faster. Other developers agreed. People were excited about programming on NeXT, and not because of any reality distortion field. Reading NeXTWorld felt like seeing into the future! (Here's an archive, rather incomplete: https://simson.net/ref/NeXT/nextworld/ The pdf scans convey more of the joi de vivre surrounding NeXT than the plain text files.)

Re: NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

#89

Post by delinka »

KirinDave wrote: post #26

My father was a lead in hardware engineering and manufacturing at NeXT. I have tons of footage of the amazing assembly technology that they used. I wonder if people would be interested in it. It was heavily top secret at the time, but NeXT built their own custom robotics system (called thor) and had all sorts of amazing in-house manufacturing tech that was incredibly automated. The hardware itself was just beautiful,…

I'd like to suggest having your dad and an Ars Technica journalist sit down for an interview. Get archive.org and Ars together to archive the footage and release a nice video edit in the article.

Re: NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

#90

Post by delinka »

elvinyung wrote: post #62

If you've read the Steve Jobs biography (or biopic), you might recall Guy Kawasaki's accidentally-prescient spoof Apple press release[1] from 1994 about a (at the time) hypothetical Apple-NeXT acquisition. Choice quote: > As a cofounder of Apple and the father of Macintosh, Jobs brings back to Apple the type of visionary leadership that enabled Apple to create three of the four personal computer standards (Apple II,…

"...and Windows)."

Was that supposed to be part of the humor of the article?

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